Neesa mutes the side effects of doses and medications. She’s a part of a housing agency that offers safe space to people who experience mental illnesses. She doesn’t walk up to the residents just to prescribe them certain drug tablets and capsules wrapped in tin foils. Instead, she morphs into a sponge that absorbs their dripping anxiety, siphoning their exhausting heavy thoughts as her own to ease the burden that weighs on their mind and shoulders. Neesa heals lost souls as a Mental Peer Health Specialist.
No, I’m not bragging. I promise I have a point. I spent a lot of time on vacation thinking about parenting and life in general. As a dad, I spend so much of my time trying to do things for my family, that I don’t get much time to do things with my family. I tend to miss out on moments when I could connect with my kids because I am focused too much on other things. So, for the week of vacation, I make it my goal to spend every second I can with my family. And I learned some lessons on vacation that I’d like to share.
Feminism was something I had encountered, like many things I now consider myself, in high school. There were the typical guys who would cry out “feminazi” about any girl who stood up for herself or who was mildly assertive. That was when I first became acquainted with the term. It was an awful introduction in all honesty. People also would react in horror to Marxism and thought Buddhism was cool, but just didn’t make sense (almost everyone was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant at my high school). I now label myself as many of the things that people found odd back then.
I never leave the hospital that day. Instead, I get the grim, but not surprising news, of finding out a disk ruptured. Essentially, the reason my nerves now felt like they were on fire was because rather than being only partially cut off, they were almost entirely cut off from the rest of my body. Which explains why my head was cocked at a forty-five-degree angle, it was to offset the severe balance problem of my brain not being able to communicate with my leg. So, surgery was inevitable, however, you’d think I’d be afraid at this point. The thing is, I wasn’t. At no point did them putting me under, or performing surgery around my spine even phase me. It just seemed like a necessary thing at this point. It was do or die for me.
But you know what, that’s the beauty of having kids. I don’t understand a lot of the things they do. I’m not supposed to, at least not at first. They are going to teach me new things. They are going to do unpredictable things, and I’m going to grow as parent because of it. It’s ok for them to be jealous of petty, silly things. It’s ok that they complain that it’s “unfair” that the other boy has to go to therapy. Every day, they do something new, and I learn something new.
If you’re a business owner looking to fill roles in your company, it’s important to think outside the box as you search for candidates. You can do this by hiring freelancers, rather than big-name agencies, and you can look to candidates like those who are disabled, seniors, and veterans. And as you bring on new employees or freelancers, consider ways to improve your workplace in order to foster a positive work environment for a diverse staff.
And even when you spend the energy to correct and call it out, you then have the back and forth of having to explain exactly why it was problematic. The burden of that shouldn’t have to fall on Black people. Arline Geronimus coined the term weathering back in the late 70s to describe the impact of racial discrimination on Black people. She found that Black people had higher incidences certain illness due to the stressors that are common and chronic in their lives. This constant stress and the effect it has on the body is what Geronimus refers to as weathering.
How to tell him about his condition, and when to tell him became the question. Do you tell a two-year old about brain scans and Probst-bundles? Do you wait until he is ten and can fully process the science of it all? We decided, after much deliberation, to begin explaining this to Tim at such a young age that he would never be able to remember a day in his life when he didn’t know about ACC. We started by explaining in small ways, that his “thinker” was a little bit different from other people’s but that it was a good thing, because it made him special. Over time, we’ve come to refer to Tim’s ACC as Magic Brain, as in, “Tim has a Magic Brain.” We started with that when Tim was just about two years old.
Another example of “is it typical behavior for a child?” raised its head when Tim was about fifteen months old. Between having ACC and hypotonia, Tim struggles with sensory issues—in particular, getting enough sensory input to allow him to process the world around him. Seeking this sensory input, Tim discovered that banging his head against the wall was a great source of input—it had a calming effect on him. But, there he was, banging his head against the wall for minutes at a time. We didn’t want to stop him from getting sensory input (if that’s what was happening), but we wanted to make sure he wasn’t banging his head against the wall for other reasons.
As a parent of children with special needs, I think that setbacks are often the most discouraging part of our children’s journeys. We can go for days and weeks and months watching them make progress and believing they have mastered a skill, and during these periods, we begin to convince ourselves that all of the challenges are behind us. But just like Icarus, I tend to fly too high, and allow myself too much complacency. When the setback occurs, I tumble.
